A Reason to Live

At 7:30 this morning, I made a batch of pumpkin donut holes that turned out like crap. I followed the recipe precisely but they still turned out gummy and almost tasteless. They aren’t even good enough to lure a raccoon into the live trap under the maple tree outside the kitchen window. I won’t be offended if the chicken turns her beak up at the one I tossed off the front porch. She’ll eat worms and grubs and bury her little face in the crumbly soil for a tick or two, but even she has a “never-gonna” list. I respect that.

The donut recipe was not on my long weekend’s long list of What I Am Going To Accomplish Before I Go Back To Work On Tuesday, drafted on my lunch hour last Thursday, and modified (read “inflated”) as Friday became Sunday afternoon became Monday at 3:00a.m. when it was too hot to sleep. In no particular order, here are the other non-donut tasks I set for myself to usher in the unofficial start to summer:

Clean out the studio.

Sort and downsize all the fabric in the primitive chippy yellow-painted cabinet on wheels in the corner of the room.

Move Aunt Louise’s armless and ornately carved oak chair (also on casters) from in front of the primitive chippy yellow-painted cabinet to the upstairs guestroom.

Make 60 face masks.

Bake six mini chocolate brownie bundt cakes.

Put the potatoes and onion sets in the ground just to the south of the cattle panel trellises I installed seven years ago.

Wash all the throw rugs in the house. All of them.

Finish a new blog about the backstories behind select items from my ongoing list of things I’m grateful for, started on February of 2015.

Make sun-blocking curtains for the west-facing living room windows out of old white cotton EMS blankets still miraculously white after retrieving them from the trash bin behind a local volunteer outpost.

Pull all the weeds along the ridge, especially the ones under the bird feeders where the kittens hide with their little faces looking hopefully upward.

Run a load of donations to the Goodwill four miles away.

Pick enough wild garlic mustard to make pesto, and then make pesto.

Clear the weeds in the old chicken run and reinforce the coop in readiness for a new small flock of layers.

You don’t see pumpkin donut holes anywhere on that list, do you? It just kept evolving as the weekend unfolded, and, undaunted, I pushed forward with such high hopes and a dreamy look on my face. It didn’t matter than I’m not thirty anymore (or forty, or fifty, or…well, let’s just stop there, shall we?) and I like sleeping past 5:00a.m. now, or that we still don’t have an outdoor spigot to hook up the garden hose and water the raised beds 60 yards away from the house (picture a series of 5-gallon buckets filled from the tap in the mudroom, then carried to the edges of the garden plot, emptied and refilled oh, maybe three times). I completely trusted that a recipe for baked donuts would equal or exceed in its outcome one requiring a vat of oil and much frying and transferring those little crispy spheres of pumpkin wonderfulness to the paper-toweled plate next to the stove. And then I’d wash the dough and cinnamon sugar from my fingertips and pin the pleats into those 60 face masks. All before lunch.

From the list above, I think I crossed off maybe three items. At this point, it doesn’t matter which ones they are, as the final hours of our long weekend evaporate, and Patrick and I flip a coin to decide who’s going to be chef this evening. I make pretty good oven-baked steak fries, seasoned with rosemary and garlic (the pantry curtains are closed indefinitely on any future donut escapades, thank goodness). We got a lot done, but scratch our heads at what, exactly, and how. Anything unfinished before the sun slips below the cottonwoods to the west will be waiting for us on our next long weekend. Plus all of their farm project friends. It never ends, ever.

Implied somewhere in that to-do list was a “once-and-for-all” clause that keeps getting run over by reality. Perhaps you know how this goes: once I empty that cabinet of all it’s fabric, reorganize it according to color and yardage and put it back in rainbow order, I’ll keep it that way, honest. I believe it with my whole soul, that the beautiful bare brown patch of soil that I just cleared of its weeds for an hour before breakfast will remain clear until sometime in late August. Then my curiosity pulls my attention down the hill to the creek where the old tire swing still dangles from the knob of a branch on the sycamore we affectionately call the “Old Man Tree” (its silhouette just after sundown looks like an old man bowing his head in deference to all at his feet. It’s touching and towering all at once), and I find a salamander or a stone speckled with flecks of quartz, and the weeds laugh behind my back as they regrow everything I just ripped from the ground eight weeks ago. Once-and-for-all is elusive at best, a myth I keep chasing, joined by its twin sisters Someday and Later. I continue to invite them to this party of a life we’re living here at Naked Acres, and they insist they’ll come, but they never do. Six years ago, I promised I wouldn’t buy anymore fabric, but do thrift store cotton shirts count? I was planning to make them into smart-looking throw pillows for the couch, all crisp in their blue-and-white stripes. I did get as far as disassembling them from their sleeves and collars (save the buttons because, well, just in case…) and then a friend showed me how to do bookbinding. Ahh well…we have enough throw pillows anyway. A writer can never have too many handmade journals.

The weekend I planned and the weekend I experienced aren’t miles apart, but neither are they holding hands. Living in an old farmhouse on a land-locked rectangle of paradise has taught us to be more adaptable than I would have thought possible. Our best-laid plans, with or without mice and men, often fall beneath the weight of what’s more important and right in front of us. Heavy rains rearrange the shape of the creek, stalwart trees lay themselves down at the behest of a dry hurricane wind in September, we uncover a neglected set of raised garden beds we built during a long-ago Memorial Day weekend and decide to give them another life. The list changes, the agenda turns an unexpected corner, and—thank God for our curiosity—we turn with it, setting our shoulders to a new wheel of skills promised, harvests hoped for, and recipes untried. The laundry still gets hung on the line and Aunt Louise’s ornately carved oak chair will eventually make it up the stairs to it’s new place in front of the window with a view of the seven rescued arbovitaes we planted back in March (see? “Someday” actually came for those little trees; they sat in pots on the porch for most of the winter).

With each season that arrives on our doorstep, we’ve learned a tiny sliver more about setting our sights without being too attached to them. It’s not about simply being flexible. It’s about a more deeply-set surrender to a rhythm that brings the birds to the feeders when the sun has just crested the eastern horizon, a power that pushes burdock through the clay-rich soil and pulls the creek waters over and around the exposed roots of an osage orange tree. When we signed the mortgage, we agreed to notice these things and tend to them when they needed us.

If we never do anything else but that, we can fall asleep knowing a solid purpose to our lives.

Donuts are optional.

Among Them

During a much-needed break in a work-from-home virtual meeting marathon, I sat eye-level with the mint patch next to the old potting shed and came to the edge of a good cry. Not quite ready to cross that line in that moment, but able at least to acknowledge the need for some kind of release, I eased myself to sit on the ground, barefoot and inhaling that lovely wild spearmint scent, a most welcome balm to soothe my weary spirit. I can cry later. I’m sure I will.

I go there often. Not the mint patch particularly, but the ground in general, and dear readers, she always—ALWAYS—delivers. I know there’s good science behind this, and that’s great. I also know that the herds of bison at Yellowstone roll around on the earth at fairly regular intervals, and it’s not, as a friend once speculated, to brush flies from their curly brown-haired hide or scratch one of those hard-to-reach-with-a-hoof itches. That hide, you should know, is three times thicker than cow hide (already 45mm thick), so near-impossible for them to feel even a horsefly’s bite. There must be other reasons to connect with the ground that way, and I leave that to greater observant spiritual minds than my own. It’s enough for me to know that they do this, and now I don’t feel so strange when the mood strikes me on the privacy of our own land.

For those few minutes on the grassy earth by the mint, though, I was treated to the afternoon agendas of everything going on below our feet and unnoticed most days. Even clocking in at barely 5’2”, I still tower above ant colonies, the elusive 4-leaf clover in a patch of normal ‘threes, spiders not even as big as the tiniest freckle on my left arm, and the barely-there silken strands they stretch from the tip of one grass blade to another, a thin and gossamer tightrope highway they traverse effortlessly every day of their eight-legged little lives.

Down on the ground, and the closer I get to the fragrant soil, the more I appreciate the privilege of where we live, how we live, and the web of life that supports everything else connected to it. I’m sure you knew (but apparently, I needed the reminder) that these little ones beneath us don’t need our help at all. Not for gathering food, laying their eggs, building their homes, moving out of harm’s way when the storms come. None of it. Makes me humble, truly, and also more inclined to walk a bit more carefully through their neighborhoods, and on top of their worlds, though I know I can’t step from the back door to the garden area without doing some damage. Never leaving the house isn’t an option either, so I’m counting on some sort of grace-filled amnesty for us two-leggeds (yet another reason to lose weight). Did you know that ants travel up to one hundred yards for food, and mostly at night? So, from the mint patch that would take them just about to the edge of the old cornfield and maybe in a couple more feet. I’ll get back to you on how they find food in the dark. I know nothing about an ant’s sense of smell. But they’re third-shifters. Finding that out left an impression. That middle-of-the-night trip of mine down the stairs and through the living room to the bathroom suddenly doesn’t seem so bad.

I’ve always had a thing for ants. I would lay flat on my stomach to watch them for minutes-into-hours when I was in my single-digits. They are so organized and efficient. And the way they briefly greeted each other in passing I found, well, civilized. What sort of all-important ant-essential information did they exchange in that split second? Simple food locator data, or the requisite “how’s it going Franklin?” rhetorical pleasantry that fills the hallways of human corporate offices (or used to, back in February)? I didn’t get that close, but being less than 10 years old, my imagination conjured up all manner of friendly Formicidae conversations (thank you Wikipedia for adding that gem to my vocabulary).

But down here in the splendor of our backyard’s grass, I’m meeting all sorts of other creations for the first time. They are colorful and curious, with yellow stripes and spindly legs whose knees look too fragile to be real. How can they amble up and over the leaves of a plantain leaf without making it move? How many eyes does that one have? How old is this one—three weeks? Two days? I push my curiosity to its limit like an urgent prayer sent upward in silent awe. I am taller and bigger than they are and still have so much to learn…

No matter what you believe or how you give yourself over to life’s liturgies, it seems more than fair—and deeply real—to draw the gently profound conclusion that a life lived on ones knees is one of the best classrooms available to our upright species. When we lower ourselves in a good and humble way (not the selling-out sort of posture too often associated with that phrase), entire worlds literally open up at our feet. When we drop the pretense of “highly evolved” and crawl on our bellies to be present among even the smallest of visible relatives, something in us can change for the better.

I hope, dear friends, you won’t wait until your next good almost-cry to let yourself down to the ground for a glimpse of the universe present in a mint patch.

Come on...Let It Out

For the amateur singer and nearly-professional Sting fan, “Fortress Around Your Heart” is best covered in the shower. The steam helps you hit that ping-pong range of notes in the refrain, and you can lather-rinse-repeat through the verses without making your voice sound too trembly. This same song belted out in the cab of your farm truck as you drive over the corrugated pavement of a small town road construction project at 38mph is disastrous, and you’re mighty grateful to be by yourself (Patrick slept in Saturday morning while I delivered granola orders to the drive-through pick-up farmer’s market an hour from home). Not even your patient husband of 28 years should be subjected to that.

I can sing fairly well most days, and I do have a couple of favorites that land right in that sweet spot of my vocal range. Pretty much anything by Billy Joel, most of Sting’s work, and “It’s Quiet Uptown” from Hamilton. Streisand’s stuff is just far enough over the alto line to make me lightheaded when I’m top-lunging it in the kitchen baking a batch of scones, and to nail it, I need to put down the measuring cups and stop stirring, stand completely still, and close my eyes for the final ascent. Don’t worry, Ms. Barbara—I plan to keep my day job.

It was Mom who introduced us to the wonders of song, playing the piano for us at home (and the organ at church), sitting us down to watch Seven Brides for Seven Brothers or The King and I, back when television boasted three major networks and you planned your dinner around these two-hour film events. It didn’t take long for my siblings and I to catch her enthusiasm, and there we’d be, pajama-clad and on the sofa, holding repurposed margarine bowls filled with hot buttered popcorn and watching Curly ride his horse, Blue, past the cattle grazing beneath that bright golden haze on the meadow (c’mon…you’re humming those first few opening bars right now, aren’t you?). For as much time as we spent in the company of their greatest works, Rodgers & Hammerstein might well have been related to us. They certainly rode shotgun on those long family car trips to Michigan every summer when Mom could tell we were getting antsy. A few choruses of “Poor Jud is Dead” (Dad’s favorite from that musical) soon had us laughing and sending requests for other show tunes forward to her place in the front passenger seat. I was usually the one to get carsick, but a little music took my mind off it, at least for a little while.

But there’s something about being by ourselves that nudges us into a self-made spotlight (hairbrush or soup ladle-microphone optional) where we knock down the last bricks of shyness, step forward and give our imaginary audiences the performance they paid for, complete with facial grimaces when we hit those notes way above our heads, or emphasize the heartache of that final lyric. If there’s room, we throw our arms open wide for the big finish and relish that split-second of silence before the crowd roars to its feet in adoration.

Ok, maybe it’s just me who does this.

Out here where we live, in the middle of what most would call “nowhere”, it’s not just easy to fill the space with song when you’re alone, it’s practically compulsory. I’ve definitely re-enacted the Knox County version of The Sound of Music (without Salzburg in the background, but then, no billboards in sight either) as I’ve walked the length of the meadow, coming out the other side breathless and not looking anything like a young and optimistic novitiate, but feeling happy. Filmed in the presence of livestock, or against the backdrop of a crisp mountain range, these songs were meant for a much broader audience, one with feathers and hooves instead of paychecks and sneakers. On my own, with no one around, I’ve tried to move like the dancers in Prince’s “Raspberry Beret” video, where they bend at the waist, pumping one shoulder toward the floor a couple of times before standing upright again in a perfect-rhythm side-step. And I really can rap the entire first act of Hamilton, all parts, with gestures and the occasional New York accent. But I have no plans to put any of that in front of the panel of judges at our local “[small town name here] Idol” contest at the county fair this year. Or any year.

These stripped-down moments of solitary confidence are for an audience we can’t see, with no critic for miles around (if we’re willing to just let ourselves be unbridled for a few moments without the sharp tongue of our own judgment). It’s deliciously indulgent and freeing, especially now. I don’t know how you’re coping with some of the isolation and solitude you’ve been experiencing since mid-March, but I would hope for a little letting-down-of-the-guard, if you will, and a bit of self-discovery that makes you glad for your gifts rather than resigned to your limitations. When we’re alone for longer than an hour, and silent for longer than three minutes, perhaps we learn that we’re not such tedious company after all. We’re smart. And funny. And clever. And our opinion is really the only one that matters. And we can nail that high note even better than Barbara.

Well now…let’s not get cocky.

If We Were Just Chatting On the Porch...

I just took delivery on a set of popsicle molds, and they’re already in the freezer, filled with a mixed berry protein smoothie blend, doing their job. An extravagance, I know. No one really needs popsicles, much less the added step of freezing your liquid breakfast so you can eat it from a stick with one hand, the other one on the steering wheel as you commute to work. But I believe in being prepared for whatever may come, and summer is on its way.

It’s not nostalgia that brought this new—what, appliance? Gadget?—into our kitchen. Growing up, ours wasn’t That House in the neighborhood that drew children from blocks around us in a line to our front porch waiting for frozen handouts as soon as schools closed for the summer. We had the normal flow of friend traffic from June to September, and sometimes they stayed for lunch or we shared a bowl of pretzels, but the reason for our get-togethers was mostly to play, not eat. I do recall one play day with a young pal, involving our attempt to create an exotic treat based on something we watched in a National Geographic episode about a group of folks incorporating insects into their meals. We all need protein, right? Inspired and not at all squeamish, we poured Hershey’s syrup into a spoon, completely covering a dead bee we’d found next to a dandelion blossom in the un-sprayed back yard, and put it in the freezer to set before giving it to another friend’s mom to try. It wasn’t a prank, honest. She was a nice lady, we knew she loved chocolate, and we wanted her opinion on our attempt to expand our youthfully-limited culinary palates. Imagine our horror when the bee’s stinger connected with her lower lip on the last bite. We watched it swell up as she handed the spoon back to us and headed to her own kitchen for a baking soda poultice. She must have shared the story with our parents at some point that summer; I have a blurry memory of mom coming back from having coffee with her a few weeks after the incident, asking what in the world we were thinking, freezing a bee in chocolate. “You’re just damn lucky she wasn’t allergic—honestly, you kids!” Of course, my friend and I had immediately decided to stick with the food and flavors we knew as we watched our friend’s mom’s lip double in size before our eyes, and hung up our test kitchen aprons in pursuit of other experiments. I can only imagine the words my own mom tried to find as she unspooled the deepest of apologies to our neighbor across that shared pot of coffee (Note to self: take a few moments to reflect on other lessons in forgiveness from your formative years. It’s time well-spent).

This year’s summer plans are still on the drafting table, and they don’t include that level of experimentation. But who knows? Three months ago, I didn’t own a cloth face mask. We must be open to the movement of spirit-plus-necessity and adjust our agendas accordingly. If you work well on shifting sands, this could be your finest hour. I encourage you to seize it with both hands.

Last night before dinner, I harvested a large plastic bowl full of wild garlic mustard. It’s wonderfully plentiful along the banks of our creek, beneath the pines along the ridge, and at the feet of the young mulberry saplings gathered in a semi-circle just off the front porch. In other words, everywhere. The work of plucking each heart-shaped leaf from the stem is offset by the way it expands our salad supply and lowers that line item on our grocery bill. And, it’s just the two of us at home, so what’s a little garlic breath between two married people? The behind-the-mask ricochet effect isn’t pleasant, but it’s nothing to get fussed about either. See? My culinary palate has matured. Finally.

I am looking forward to our first garden harvest this season, considering all the work we’ve put into coddling the seedlings that sprawl their thin green stems across their respective (and repurposed) planting trays to visit with one another in the bright sunlight of the guest room’s south-facing window. Viewed as one, it resembles the day care version of Little Shop of Horrors, and even if we were hosting loved ones from afar, I doubt they’d want to sleep in the oak sleigh bed a mere three feet away. Runner beans, even in their youth, do look as if they want to wrap ‘round your neck and stay there. Thank goodness the tomato starts are too small to give away their eventual vining tendencies. They’ll be outside and beneath the soil line long before they look like the wandering souls that they are. I’ll try to tame them at first, like I do every year we’ve grown them, but I surrender to the sheer volume of suckers that sprout from seemingly every “elbow”, and let them continue through the season as their wild and gangly selves. Makes me wonder what kind of parent I’d have been.

Keeping all of these moving parts moving is a sizeable part of our days, and we made note of that after dinner the other night. What did we do before the pandemic closed in the walls of our otherwise to-and-fro existence? It’s strange…I miss a few things about that rhythm from back in late February/early March, but feel quite at peace tending to what’s important and right in front of us from one day to the next. Now it’s about keeping the compost turned and fluffy, rotating the seedlings toward the sun, and splitting my work days between office and home. There’s still plenty to do there, and I’m damn lucky to have a job. Not a day passes when I don’t offer that up to the skies before I dig into a still-hefty to-do list. Every day has something to do with the handmade masks our volunteer staff are making for members of our clinical teams. We discuss adjustments to the patterns we provided and who’s got a line on a source for elastic. Whether the straps should fit around the head or around the ears. There’s no “once and for all” anymore, not even in sewing. Then I think about the colleagues who will wear them, and my gaze is skyward again. Keep them safe, please.

So, dear readers (if you’ve traveled this far with me), we’ve gone from popsicles to chocolate covered bees to face masks, and there’s probably still more to be said. If the sun comes up tomorrow, if we’re granted another day to try and get it right, we can pick up where we left off. I’d be ok with that.